The Emory Training Program in Lung Health

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The Emory Training Program in Lung Health is in its 4th year, having begun on August 1st, 2013 with the goal of training highly collaborative MD, MD/PhD and PhD post-doctoral translational investigators who can transform our ability to promote lung health in our society. In the current first 5-year funding period the Program supports four post-doctoral training slots and two short-term summer fellowships per year for African-American medical students from the Morehouse School of Medicine. The Program is directed by Lou Ann Brown, PhD and David Guidot, MD; for the next funding period (Years 6-10) they are joined by Mike Hart, MD. These co-directors are long-time collaborators, both in their research programs and in their leadership of T32-supported post-doctoral training at Emory University for the past fifteen years. They have enlisted a multidisciplinary faculty of mentors from the School of Medicine and the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. The Program and its faculty mentors encompass nearly every facet of pulmonary biology, but clear areas of excellence include translational research in Cystic Fibrosis, Pulmonary Vascular Disease, Pulmonary Immunology, Redox Biology, Metabolomics, Airway Epithelial Biology, Pulmonary Innate Defense and Infections, and HIV- and alcohol-mediated lung disease. Post-doctoral MD and MD/PhD fellows will be recruited from the multiple outstanding fellowship training programs in the Departments of Pediatrics and Medicine from which the faculty mentors are drawn. Post-doctoral PhD fellows will be recruited from the national pool of qualified candidates as well as from the local pool of doctoral students completing their pre-doctoral education in the Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences within the Laney Graduate School at Emory University. The two short- term summer research students will be recruited from the Morehouse School of Medicine where the Program Directors have an established relationship with the Dean of Student Affairs and a substantial training history with their top students over the past decade. Trainees work in collaborative research activities and have access to a wide range of institutional resources including the Masters of Science in Clinical Research Program that has proven to be an invaluable experience for a large number of our post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty over the past fifteen years. Our Training Program has filled all of its positions and in light of the diverse and large pools of outstanding candidates coupled with the capacity of the faculty mentors we are requesting a graduated increase in the number of post-doctoral positions over Years 6-8 such that we can reach our optimal size of eight positions going forward. Lung health is an enormous challenge in our society, with lung diseases accounting for an ever increasing global burden in morbidity and mortality. There are compelling reasons to train investigators from diverse backgrounds and disciplines and provide them with the collaborative skills to meet this challenge and improve lung health across the lifespan.